Viewers of television programs these days are accustomed to receiving a vast amount of content, ranging from news and movies to talk shows and speciality programs. In order to accommodate the needs of even its average viewers, a service provider has to be able to offer a large number of channels, each channel catering to a different interest. From the service provider perspective, the biggest challenge is reconciling the ever-increasing demand for a larger selection of content with the finite bandwidth available to the service providers for distribution of such content. This problem is particularly acute in a Direct-to-Home (DTH) satellite broadcast environment, but is also experienced by service providers using other delivery media (such as cable distribution networks and IPTV distribution networks).
One recent phenomenon in the television distribution industry has been the experience of Interactive Television applications, commonly referred to as iTV applications. iTV applications create new possibilities for viewers, namely enabling viewers to enjoy interactive content. One illustrative implementation of iTV applications is a horoscope iTV application. The service provider acquires horoscope content from a content source, which in this case may be a popular psychic or an astrologist. The horoscope content for all zodiacs is compiled into an iTV application, which comprises a content module and a navigation module to enable viewers to navigate through the content module. When a particular viewer is interested in her horoscope, she would tune into a specific channel associated with the horoscope iTV application using a receiver device (such as a set-top box) connected to her television. Tuning to the specific channel would trigger downloading of the application and/or activation of an application stored in the receiver device's memory. Upon activation of the application, a menu from the navigation module is presented to the viewer enabling the viewer to choose particular content from the content available in the content module. For illustration purposes, assume that the viewer is a Sagittarius. Using the navigation keys of a remote control and an interface presented by the iTV application, the viewer can select a Sagittarius category and, thus, retrieve relevant horoscope information for Sagittarius.
As the thrust for greater interacting evolves, viewers are no longer satisfied with one-size-fits-all applications such as horoscopes. Rather, they demand increasingly personalized content. However, the principal limitation of the existing iTV applications is associated with the limited bandwidth available to the service providers. The limited bandwidth results in a limited amount of content that can be provided. Faced with this dilemma, service providers have resorted to statistical methods of attempting to satisfy most of their viewers' needs, most of the time, with as little bandwidth as possible. The service providers generally refer to this strategy as an 80/20 rule or as a “Pareto principle”, i.e. twenty percent of available content, at each level of depth, should satisfy the interest of eighty percent of viewers. In an example, the service provider may select stocks traded on 20% of the world's stock exchanges. This is likely to satisfy interest of 80% of the viewers. However, in order to differentiate from the competition, the service provider may want to provide a service to the remaining 20% of viewers.
Therefore, there is a need for a solution that would deliver content tailored according to specific's viewer interest while overcoming the limited bandwidth problem.